Council Eyes Funding for Garage on Proposed Stadium Site

As the proposed soccer stadium project went up in smoke along with the city’s bid for a Major League Soccer expansion team, local authorities are looking to channel their resources in a different direction. It was recently announced that the Las Vegas City Council has greenlit the development of a parking garage in the area where the proposed stadium would have taken shape.

Since the proposed soccer stadium project went up in smoke along with the city’s bid for a Major League Soccer expansion team, local officials are looking to channel their resources in a different direction.With that mission in mind, the Las Vegas City Council recently gave the green light to development of a parking garage on the site where the proposed stadium was to have taken shape.

The council approved the stadium project amid controversy and a large amount of pushback, which eventually led to a petition to place the stadium project on the ballot for a public vote, according to watchdog.org. When the petition won a favorable court ruling, the league put the city’s bid for a soccer team on hold until at least 2018. That, in turn, scuttled the stadium proposal.

Development costs for the newly-approved parking garage would rise to around $25 million, but the council has put in place a Tourism Improvement District that would raise up to $45 million for the project.

In total, the Tourism Improvement District would yield $66 million in tax revenue over four years. That projection assumes a robust development program at Symphony Park: three casinos, 1,800 housing units and roughly 257,000 square feet of retail space, all getting under way by the beginning of 2016. However, critics of the Tourism Improvement District were quick to point out that many of those projects have yet to break ground.